In a large sense, modernism in architecture is defined by what it is not. It is not a style that can be traced to a specific time and place, nor a revival of any earlier styles.
It is stripped of historical references and ornamentation, cleaner and sleeker than anything that came before it.
"I think of modernism as being about space and light and the experience of a building as the driving characteristics rather than decoration or predetermined forms," said architect Chris Evans, vice president of MAPP, the Modern Architecture Preservation Project.
Architect Arthur Brown helped bring modernism to Tucson, beginning in 1936, and was its most successful practitioner with 10 homes on the MAPP Modern 50 list of significant residences. Brown was noted for saying that his goal was to design "without style."
The list focuses on modernism as interpreted by a couple dozen Tucson architects, led by Brown, William Wilde and Nicholas Sakellar. Those three pioneers made their marks with large public buildings in Tucson but also left behind a body of residential work.
People are also reading…
For the most part, these are handsome homes, but some have bizarre sculptural elements or massive facades that you must learn to love.
They range from the Frank Lloyd Wrightish knockoffs of the Prairie style to the brutalist cast-concrete houses of Tucson architect Judith Chafee.
They are characterized by flat or lightly sloped roofs with deep overhangs, geometric shapes, window walls that erase the line between inside and out, open floor plans, clean lines and unfinished building materials.
In a particularly Tucson touch, many of these homes use burnt-adobe blocks. Early practitioners, especially, used block and brick to introduce modernism to clients who wanted something familiar in their new homes, said Evans.
By the late '60s, architects had introduced unfinished walls and exposed aggregate to their designs.
Aspects of modernism - clean lines, big windows and flat roofs - were given their most prolific expression in the style called suburban ranch, which dominated Tucson development in the '60s and '70s, but only a few ranch homes made the Modern 50 list.
Custom builder Tom Gist designed five homes on the list, including one of his ranch-style "Custom-Flex" designs.
Also included is a 1961 home in the east-side Windsor Park subdivision, where builder Herbert Oxman represented the "highest aspirations of midcentury modern tract subdivision," according to the MAPP report.
Most of the suburban-ranch-style houses built in Tucson were cookie-cutter production homes, dizzying in their sameness.
"Not everyone will agree with me on this," said Evans, "but I see a distinction. A lot of what qualifies as a ranch house is not modern. It is not focused on space and light and the experience of the architecture as much as creating this image, this aura of the suburban home."
COX RESIDENCE 1963
Jim Reed lives in a home that the Modern Architecture Preservation Project calls the "most Wrightian" residence in Tucson.
Reed is a midcentury freak. He formerly owned the Shelter, a Grant Road cocktail lounge designed by modernist architect Anne Rysdale, restored by Reed to its '60s glory and filled with his collection of '60s kitsch.
Reed has decorated his lower Foothills home in similar style, with lighted mirrors, swooping floor lamps, JFK memorabilia, starburst clocks and period record albums. He even "resparkled" the popcorn ceiling in the media room and deeply laments the replacement of the turquoise formica counters in his kitchen with updated faux granite.
He decided to buy the home the day he first saw it four years ago. It was his kind of place.
Reed's home is the former residence of architect Charles Cox, a disciple of Wright's.
It is the only Cox home on the list. The church Cox designed on North Country Club Road, now known as the Catalina Church of Midtown, made an earlier Modern 50 list of commercial and institutional buildings.
The home's floor plan is an assemblage of triangles creating an overall shape that looks like a stealth bomber on the original drawings inherited by Reed.
The triangles are scored into the home's concrete floors and most noticeable in the expansive living room where a window wall angles southwest toward a partially obscured view of the city lights.
Reed loves the home but says it's not for everyone.
"You really have to be into this Frank Lloyd Wright, crazy-triangle stuff, and you just have to put up with a lot of other things."
For instance, "one of the ridiculous but cool things" about the house are the triangular skylights that surround the articulated block fireplace at the roofline. He covers them over in summer because they let more heat into to an already hot house, with its walls of single-paned windows.
When his daughter isn't visiting, or his mother isn't living with him, Reed has tried toughing it out, allowing the temperatures to dip into the low 40s in winter and rise to 110 degrees in summer.
He has melted the candles and chocolate chips in his pantry with that Spartan exercise, Reed said.
RAPPAPORT RESIDENCE 1948
Jane Prior lives in one of three William Wilde homes on the Modern 50 list.
Her two-bedroom, one bath residence sits on a midtown street of tidy brick homes just off East Grant Road.
When she bought the home 14 years ago, the previous owner gave her the obituary story about architect Wilde, but she did not have a full appreciation of the need to preserve the home until she was contacted by the Modern 50 project.
It has changed her to-do list.
"I'd like to redo the whole bathroom, but after talking to Chris (Evans), it's like 'I-yi-yi, I can't do that.' "
The kitchen had already been redone when she moved in and a previous owner had taken out the floor-to-ceiling glass and sliding doors that led to a now-enclosed patio at the rear of the home.
The major element of the home's design is intact, however.
The south-facing front of the home is a slanted window wall that, together with a modest roof overhang, shades itself except in midwinter.
It is one of many passive solar features that Tucson's desert modernists included in their designs. Brown, in particular, was known for his innovative use of orientation and shade structures.
Inside Prior's home, the built-in shelves and closets remain, but the record cabinet built for the original owner, Harold Rappaport, has been removed.
Rappaport, according to an architectural magazine that took note of the home's construction in 1948, was an audiophile who wanted space for entertaining in an otherwise small house.
Like many homes built in the cheap-energy days, Prior's house is badly insulated and she has covered the west window in foil to mitigate her biggest heat source.
This was an early version of Wilde's modernism, which would later take the form of exposed concrete walls in a style known as brutalism, exemplified by his design for the Tucson Police headquarters downtown.
An earlier Wilde building, the College Shops on North Park Avenue near the University of Arizona, was perhaps "the purest expression of the tenets of early European modernism built in Tucson," according to a Wilde biography compiled by MAPP. That building was demolished in 2001 by the Marshall Foundation to make way for a UA classroom building.
TOMIZUKA RESIDENCE 1969
Carol Tomizuka said she and her former husband settled first on modern, then went looking for an architect.
They asked three architects to show them examples of their work and decided quickly when Jim Gresham invited them to his house.
"This is it," Carol said she told him. "You're hired."
Gresham did not duplicate his home for the Tomizukas, though the most striking element of both homes is a free-standing screen wall with window-like cutouts that frame a view of the nearby vegetation and the mountains beyond. Gresham said he was trying to give the homes a context that modernism lacked.
Gresham said both homes "represent a conscious attempt to try to move beyond modernism as it was understood at the time."
"They have much more of an emphasis upon interior space and how spaces relate - how single story and two story spaces interrelate with each other."
The second floor hallway mezzanine did just that, said Tomizuka, giving her four children a chance to spy on their parents' parties when they were supposed to be in bed.
Tomizuka, like Jim Reed, felt compelled to cover her skylights in summer, devising thick foam plugs for them that keep out the unwanted heat.
"In those days, we had low energy costs," said Gresham.
"One thing I've always worked very hard at is the light quality in my buildings - to be able to design a building with a lovely source of ambient light quality inside and get away from the harsh single direction light that you often find in buildings that just face in one direction."
The Tomizuka residence is a parallelogram, which makes for some interesting corner spaces inside, but the living room has a curved wall to accommodate a stairwell. Tomizuka said she insisted on that. Gresham said "architecture is very capable of expressing irony and that's an instance of that."
Later in his career, Gresham designed modern residences for one client who wanted a Spanish Colonial feel and another who wanted a home built from burnt adobes.
He thought both were a departure from the "unashamedly modernist" sensibility of his earlier work, but now considers them his best residential work.
"A lot of architects began to feel that modernism was very limited and not expressive enough. We were all kind of looking for channels and ways to introduce more complexity and visual interest into the buildings."
MAPP dates the modernist movement in Tucson from 1945 to 1975, though the list contains a few buildings that fall outside those dates.
On StarNet: More photos at azstarnet.com/gallery
IF YOU GO
Five modern homes are on next Sunday's self-guided architecture tour, part of the Architecture Week program sponsored by the Southern Arizona chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Four contemporary buildings, and three architects' spaces are also on the tour.
Chris Evans, vice president of the Modern Architecture Preservation Project, will give a talk on the Modern 50 homes at 1 p.m. Saturday - part of that day's architecture lecture series, beginning at 11 a.m. at the UA Poetry Center, 1508 E. Helen St.
Visit www.aiasouthernarizona.org or call 323-2191 for tour tickets, details and more of the weeklong events.
Get a preview of architect John Messina's backyard bedroom, one of the Architecture Tour sites, in At Home.
See the full Modern 50 list and learn more about Tucson Modernism at www.mapptucson.org
DID YOU KNOW ...
• Arthur Brown (1900-1993) is credited with designing the first school to be partially heated and cooled by the sun - Rose Elementary.
• Nicholas Sakellar (1918-1993) designed Catalina High School and the Wilmot branch of the Pima County Public Library.
• William Wilde (1904-1984), in addition to the Tucson Police headquarters, designed the neighboring Fire Department building, now home to the Museum of Contemporary Art.
SOURCE: "A Guide to Tucson Architecture" by Anne M. Nequette and R. Brooks Jeffery
Contact reporter Tom Beal at tbeal@azstarnet.com or 573-4158.
